Engineering topics

Heiligers, Jeannette

Publications and source records attributed to Heiligers, Jeannette.

2 records

NASA NTRS2018

Solar Sail Transfers from Invariant Objects to L5 Periodic Orbits

The rising interest in a mission to the Sun-Earth L5 point for heliophysics or Trojan asteroid search and the development of solar sails has opened the question of using solar radiation pressure for such a mission. Different solar sail trajectories to the Sun-Earth L5 point are constructed. Different invariant objects in the neighbourhood of Earth are considered for departure: equilibrium points, families of periodic orbits and their associated invariant manifold. Using a multi-objective genetic algorithm, differential correction and the optimal control solver PSOPT the transfers are obtained. The approach followed results in fast solar sail transfers which can be used for the preliminary design of a mission to the Sun-Earth L5 point.

Fernandez, Alvaro↗

NASA NTRS2016

Low-Thrust Transfers from Distant Retrograde Orbits to L2 Halo Orbits in the Earth-Moon System

This paper presents a study of transfers between distant retrograde orbits (DROs) and L2 halo orbits in the Earth-Moon system that could be flown by a spacecraft with solar electric propulsion (SEP). Two collocation-based optimal control methods are used to optimize these highly-nonlinear transfers: Legendre pseudospectral and Hermite-Simpson. Transfers between DROs and halo orbits using low-thrust propulsion have not been studied previously. This paper offers a study of several families of trajectories, parameterized by the number of orbital revolutions in a synodic frame. Even with a poor initial guess, a method is described to reliably generate families of solutions. The circular restricted 3-body problem (CRTBP) is used throughout the paper so that the results are autonomous and simpler to understand.

trajectory design↗